An assumption before I get into this: this is really only useful for people who already have a budget and have their finances under control.
I've used Google Sheets to track my budget for a while now and have always been a little annoyed at the lack of context around my finances (what's saving an extra $100 or $300 here and there?). Sure there are calculators for when you can retire based on what you're saving and such but that's so far in the future it might as well psychologically be meaningless.
Something I put together as a "what if" experiment has actually been really useful in putting my monthly ins and outs in context. Basically, I set up a tab for my wife and I that asks and answers the question "how long will it be before we can buy an $x house?" It takes our monthly cash inflow, subtracts out stuff from the budget tab (plus a buffer), and tells me in years how long it'll take for us to afford a house and end up house poor and how long it'll take for us to afford a house with a buffer (sheet example is here with a $1.4M house price tag as an example -- changed our numbers fairly significantly for privacy's sake).
What this does for us is if we want to add some big monthly expense (new car, a pet, move to a nicer place, etc.), we can see immediately what it would do to that short/mid-term goal. Is it now going to take us an extra 0.7 years to save for it? Is that okay with us?
It really just started out as a way for me to try to answer that question but I've kept the tab around for my own personal finance because I think it adds some constant helpful context whenever stuff happens (even a bad month on the budget [holidays or something] taken with a grain of salt has neat context there), so I thought I'd share!
Submitted January 05, 2019 at 01:46PM by pfthrowaway293872948 http://bit.ly/2C0VbQb
